The 2012 Obama Reelection Dinner will be:

May 5th, 2012
6:30 p.m. -10:00 p.m.
Knoxville Airport Hilton
Tickets: $40.00 (Tickets will not be sold at the door)

Our Keynote Speaker for the evening will be Tennessee Democratic Party Chairmain, Chip Forrester.

We will have 2012 Election gear available for purchase, Dollar Bag Auction items, music, a cash bar and a sit down dinner.

Tickets are onsale now for a $40.00 donation and may be purchased from Executive Committee Members, at Southland Books, stop by our headquarters on Ellis Avenue in Maryville or calling our 379-Vote(8683).

Everyone is welcome to attend the County Convention on March 10 but if you wish to become a Delegate or a candidate to be a delegate please follow the instructions contained in the forms downloadable below.

In order to become a candidate to be a delegate you must first fill out a Declaration of Candidace Pledge of Support Form the download link is below, or you may go to the TNDP website to download the same form.

THIS FORM MUST BE COMPLETED AND RETURNED TO THE TENNESSEE DEMOCRATIC PARTY HEADQUATERS NO LATER THAN MARCH 1, 2012 IN ORDER TO BE ELIGIBLE TO BE A CANDIDATE TO BE A DELEGATE AT THE MARCH 10, 2012 LOCAL COUNTYWIDE DELEGATE CONVENTION and/or THE DISTRICT CONVENTION and/or THE NATIONAL CONVENTION. Also included below is a one page description of how the delegate process works in Tennessee.

DeclarationofCandidacyPledgeofSupportform

OnePageHowtobecomeaTennesseedelegate

President’s State of the Union Address Will Outline Blueprint for an America Built to Last

Key Point: President Obama will outline in his State of the Union a blueprint for a job-creating economy that’s built to last – one where hard work pays, responsibility is rewarded, and everyone does their fair share and plays by the same rules.

* In his State of the Union address, the President will lay out a blueprint for an economy that’s built to last – an economy built on American manufacturing, American energy, skills for American workers, and a renewal of American values.

* This is a make-or-break moment for the middle class and those trying to reach it. At stake is the very survival of the basic American promise that if you work hard, you can do well enough to raise a family, own a home and have some savings when you retire.

* The defining issue and most urgent challenge of our time is how to keep that promise alive. We can either settle for a country where a shrinking number of people do really well but most Americans barely get by, or we can build a nation where everyone gets a fair shot, everyone does their fair share, and everyone plays by the same rules.

* The economic security of the middle class has eroded for decades. Long before the recession, good jobs and manufacturing began leaving our shores. Hard work stopped paying off for too many Americans. Those at the top saw their incomes rise like never before, but the vast majority of Americans struggled with costs that were growing and paychecks that weren’t.

* The house of cards collapsed in 2008 after mortgages were sold to people who couldn’t afford or understand them, and banks made huge bets and paid bonuses with other people’s money. It was a crisis that cost us more than eight million jobs and plunged our economy and the world into a crisis from which we are still fighting to recover.

* The President has been clear that we still need to do more to create jobs and grow the economy. But under his leadership, the economy is growing again.

o The economy has added nearly 3.2 million private sector jobs over the last 22 months.

o American manufacturing is creating jobs for the first time since the late 1990s.

o The American auto industry is coming back, adding 100,000 jobs in the last year alone.

o American oil production is at the highest in eight years.

o We’re cutting the deficit by more than $2 trillion.

o And, as a result of reforms the signed into law, we’re reining in Wall Street abuses.

· Tonight he will lay out a blueprint that will build on this solid record and ensure an economy built to last over the long term, not one based on outsourcing, loopholes and risky financial deals that jeopardize the middle class.

* To move forward as a country, reduce our deficit and invest in manufacturing and education, we need to invest in it. There’s no question our tax code is far too complicated, and stacked against the middle class. When the average middle-class worker pays a higher tax rate than someone making $50 million a year, we have to change it to ensure that everyone pays their fair share and plays by the same rules.

* Tonight, the President will lay out specifics on the Buffett Rule, which says that millionaires and billionaires should pay at least the same tax rate as middle class Americans. Warren Buffett said he should not pay a lower tax rate than his secretary, and in fact his secretary – Debbie Bosanek – is sitting in the First Lady’s box tonight.

Romney Refuses to Pay His Fair Share or Level with the American People About It

Key Point: In releasing only last year’s tax returns and a guess for this year’s, Mitt Romney shows not only that he refuses to pay his fair share – he refuses even to level with the American people about it.

* After years of resisting and three different positions on it in the past two weeks, Mitt Romney today released limited and insufficient information about his finances. He showed not only that he refuses to pay his fair share – he refuses even to level with the American people about it.

* Romney gave John McCain’s campaign 23 years of tax returns when he was vetted for vice president, but today believes the American people are only entitled to one full year’s worth of returns and a guess on this year’s.

* This not only defies precedent set by presidential candidates – his father released 12 years of tax returns, President Bush released returns back to 1991, and President Obama released eight years of tax returns during the 2008 campaign – but it further weakens the central premise of his candidacy.

* Romney wants voters to judge him on his “real economy” experience at Bain Capital, but he won’t release his tax returns from the years he ran the company.

* Romney used loopholes available only to the wealthiest and large corporations to avoid paying his fair share. There may be substantial unresolved issues:
o We know Romney recently divested from China after deciding it conflicted with his ever-changing position on that country. We know he closed a Swiss bank account because he was worried it might cause political problems. But we don’t know about other potential conflicts of interest.
o We know Romney has made a fortune using offshore investments, from Swiss bank accounts to investments in famous tax havens like the Caymans, Bermuda and Luxembourg. But we don’t know if that helped him defer paying taxes on his Bain income or if he made offshore investments for non-tax reasons.

* This we know for sure: Romney doesn’t think he should have to pay his fair share, unlike most Americans. Romney pays a lower tax rate than many police, firefighters, teachers and small business owners, and he doesn’t want that to change.

* He opposes the Buffett Rule that would make sure millionaires and billionaires don’t pay lower tax rates than the middle class, and he opposes eliminating tax loopholes like the “carried interest” benefit for Wall Street so that the tax code rewards hard work instead of just wealth.

The fiscal super committee created by last summer’s deal to raise the debt ceiling was charged with crafting a $1.5 trillion deficit reduction package by Thanksgiving. However, moments ago, the committee’s co-chairs issued a statement officially conceding that “it will not be possible to make any bipartisan agreement available to the public before the committee’s deadline.” For weeks, the GOP has been refusing to even consider new revenue, pairing modest attempts to close loopholes in the tax code with giant new tax cuts centered on the very rich that would add trillions to the deficit. The committee’s co-chairman Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-TX) even said the GOP would not consider “any penny” in new revenue (a statement that he later walked back). Without a deal, automatic cuts are supposed to be scheduled for 2013, but several congressional leaders have been discussing canceling the cuts, leaving the super committee the latest in a long line of deficit commissions to unable to succeed in their attempt to alter the U.S. budget.

GOP REFUSED TO TAX MILLIONAIRES & BILLIONAIRES: The GOP, in lockstep with anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist and his radical Americans for Tax Reform no-taxes pledge, adamantly refused to include new revenue in a deficit reduction deal. Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA), one of the super committee’s members, released a plan to raise $300 billion in revenue via closing loopholes in the tax code, but at the same time lowering income tax rates, including taking the top tax rate from its current 35 percent down to 28 percent. A second, smaller plan put forward by the GOP included $640 billion in deficit reduction, with just $3 billion coming from closing tax loopholes. As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities noted, the Toomey plan would result in a “shift in tax burdens from households at the top of the income scale to low- and middle-income households.” “The Toomey plan still results in the biggest tax cut since the Great Depression. It would be the biggest tax cut since Calvin Coolidge, and we all know how that turned out,” said Sen. Jon Kerry (D-MA) on NBC’s Meet the Press yesterday. “Now, we didn’t come here to do another tax cut for the wealthiest people while we’re (asking) fixed-income seniors to ante up more, people on Medicaid, who are poor, to ante up more.” Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA), who is Hensarling’s co-chair on the super committee, added, “as long as we have some Republican lawmakers who feel more enthralled with a pledge they took to a Republican lobbyist [Norquist] than they do to a pledge to the country to solve the problems, this is going to be hard to do.”

DEMOCRATS PUT SACRED COWS ON THE TABLE, GOP STILL SAID NO TO TAXING MILLIONAIRES: While Republicans have offered merely gimmicks in terms of revenue, Democrats on the super committee offered concession after concession in an attempt to cut a deal. The final Democratic offer included the same level of cuts to Medicare and Medicaid and the same level of reductions in government programs as the Toomey plan, along with $400 billion in revenue, for a total package that included $5 in spending cuts for every $1 in revenue. For comparisons sake, compared to a current policy baseline (that assumes all the Bush tax cuts get extended), the Bowles-Simpson deficit reduction plan included a one to one spending cuts to revenue ratio. The $400 billion in revenue that Democrats offered in the super committee was half what House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) reportedly offered during the debt ceiling negotiations. The Democrats’ rightward-leaning offers came at the same time that the public has shown, in poll after poll, that it favors increasing taxes on the rich and preserving the social safety net in any deficit reduction deal. In fact, even supposedly anti-government Tea Partiers oppose cuts to Medicare and Social Security by a 76-22 margin, while 68 percent of millionaires favor raising their own taxes.

AUTOMATIC CUTS UNDONE?: According to the terms of the debt ceiling agreement ,the inability of the super committee to agree to a deal triggers $1.2 trillion in automatic spending cuts in 2013, split about evenly between discretionary spending and defense. However, conservatives have already begun plotting a way to negate those cuts. “The sequestration is not engraved on golden tablets. It is a notional aspiration,” Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) said earlier this month. “And I think we’d have sufficient support to prevent those kind of cuts from being enacted because of the impact it would have on national security.” Rep. Buck McKeon used 9/11 imagery to warn against the cuts actually taking place. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has also gotten in on the action, saying that if the defense cuts in the deal were enacted, “in effect, it invites aggression.” However, as Center for American Progress Senior Fellow Larry Korb writes, “Panetta grossly exaggerates when he says it would be disastrous if projected levels of defense spending are reduced by an additional $500 billion if the bipartisan “super committee” deadlocks and automatic cuts go into effect. Adding $500 billion (from the super committee) to the $450 billion already being cut would mean total reductions of $950 billion over the next decade, or about 15 percent. Since the defense budget has grown by more than 50 percent over the past 10 years, it can easily absorb a 15 percent reduction — which would be about half the defense cuts of Presidents Eisenhower and Nixon and less than that of George H. W. Bush.” President Obama has said he ”will not accept any measure that attempts to turn off the automatic cut trigger.”

If you’re a middle-class American worried about losing your job, your home or your health care, don’t look to Mitt Romney for leadership – he’s fishing for right-wing votes by promising to turn his back on you.

Romney opposes President Obama’s successful loan to the auto industry, even though it saved 1.4 million jobs. Instead, as Romney said in an op-ed in the New York Times – and reiterated tonight – he would have “let Detroit go bankrupt.”

The former finance executive also doubled down on his opposition to helping homeowners devastated by foreclosure through no fault of their own. He thinks the process should “run its course and hit the bottom,” hoping investors can make a quick buck while families continue to suffer.

Romney tried to run away from the health reform law he signed in Massachusetts and called a “model for the nation” to copy. Tonight he repeated his plan to let insurance companies go back to discriminating against patients based on preexisting conditions, kicking young adults off their parents’ plans and re-opening the prescription-drug doughnut hole for seniors.

While he’s been all over the map on President Obama’s payroll tax cut – last month belittling the fact that an typical working family would get $1,500 back, but tonight claiming support of it – his own plan offers them just $54.

And despite many other well-documented flip-flops – on choice, heath care, the Recovery Act, Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, Afghanistan, guns and so much more – Romney tonight called himself “a man of steadiness and constancy.” But the only thing Mitt Romney is consistent about is saying and standing for anything to get elected, and the American people – Republicans and Democrats alike – simply aren’t buying it.

Just as in every previous debate, none of tonight’s Republican candidates offered a single idea for creating jobs. While they parrot the same dangerous Tea Party ideas that threatened our economy in the first place, President Obama will continue fighting for a job-creating economy that’s built to last – one where hard work pays, responsibility is rewarded, and everyone does their fair share and plays by the same rules.

Tonight, a majority of United States Senators voted to advance the
American Jobs Act. But even though this bill contains the kind of
proposals Republicans have supported in the past, their party obstructed
the Senate from moving forward on this jobs bill.

Tonight’s vote is by no means the end of this fight. Independent
economists have said that the American Jobs Act would grow the economy
and lead to nearly two million jobs, which is why the majority of the
American people support these bipartisan, common-sense proposals. And
we will now work with Senator Reid to make sure that the individual
proposals in this jobs bill get a vote as soon as possible.

In the coming days, Members of Congress will have to take a stand on
whether they believe we should put teachers, construction workers,
police officers and firefighters back on the job. They’ll get a vote on
whether they believe we should cut taxes for small business owners and
middle-class Americans, or whether we should protect tax breaks for
millionaires and billionaires.

With each vote, Members of Congress can either explain to their
constituents why they’re against common-sense, bipartisan proposals to
create jobs, or they can listen to the overwhelming majority of American
people who are crying out for action. Because with so many Americans
out of work and so many families struggling, we can’t take “no” for an
answer. Ultimately, the American people won’t take “no” for an answer.
It’s time for Congress to meet their responsibility, put their party
politics aside and take action on jobs right now.